Fred Nitzsche, Smart Rotor Systems

Fred Nitzsche, Smart Rotor Systems

Dr. Fred Nitzsche is one of founders of Smart Rotor Systems, a company dedicated to innovation in rotorcraft and wind turbines. He is also Guest Professor at TU Delft in the Netherlands and a Full Professor at Carleton University in Canada. A PhD graduate from the famous Prof. Holt Ashley at Sanford University, USA, in 1983 he became in 1986 Chief of the Aeroelasticity Group at EMBRAER (Brazil). Moving to Germany in 1991, he was one the pioneers in the development of “smart” structures working at the German Aerospace Institute, DLR. In 1995 he moved to the National Research Council Canada to be a scientific leader in the multi-national consortium BLA (Canada-USA-Australia), which demonstrated the efficacy of this technology in aircraft applications. Dr. Nitzsche was the leader between 2004 and 2009 of the international consortium SHARCS (Germany-Italy-Canada) that validated a unique control concept for helicopter rotor vibration reduction – the Smart Spring, one of his patents. At Carleton University since 1999 he was the supervisor / co-supervisor of over 10 PhD students, 40 M.Sc. students and the author / co-author of over 170 journal and referred conference publications on aeroelasticity and “smart” structures applied to both fixed and rotary wing aircraft.